Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(45)
“Fuck you,” I say, which makes him wince from the incivility of it all. “You think I’m working with my ex? Sincerely, fuck you.” I stand up, set my glass with a thump, and head for the door. Rivard smoothly angles his chair forward to cut me off, and I’m not quite angry enough to punch a rich old man who’s wheelchair-bound. “Move.”
“I was only seeing your reaction,” he tells me calmly. “I do apologize if you were offended.”
I’m staring straight into his eyes. “If I was offended? Fuck you and your Ivory Tower power-play bullshit. That sick bastard is hunting me. He’s hunting my children. Either help, or get out of my way. Is that direct enough for you?”
Behind me, Sam stands, too. I hear his glass hit the table. “We don’t need you,” he tells Rivard. “Go to hell.”
It’s not quite Fuck you, but I’ll take it. He’s probably thinking about Mike Lustig, and not completely destroying this back channel, but I don’t have any kind of patience. I am incandescent with rage. Melvin’s Little Helper had her day in court, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone say this to my face again.
Rivard blinks first. “All right,” he says, then moves his chair out of my way. “You’re welcome to leave if you like, I won’t stop you. But I do apologize, Ms. Proctor. That was rude. But I had to be certain you weren’t . . . one of them.”
“Absalom, you mean,” I say, and he nods. “It was Absalom you were after? That’s who Sauer was looking into?”
“Yes.” He takes a long breath. “My son suffered from, as they term it these days, affluenza. I would simply call him spoiled. It led to drug and alcohol addiction, which resulted in a variety of problems. All tiresomely predictable. A cliché.” He waves that away. “Absalom targeted him, and they were unspeakably cruel in how they tormented him online. No reason at all. Simply because he was an easy target. Amusement, I suppose.”
“How did they attack him?” I ask, but I think I already know. He takes another drink, then puts his glass down on the table to join ours. It means he’s surrendering his last defense, I think.
“It started as postings. What do they call them on the Internet? Memes. One day he woke up and discovered he was the butt of a thousand jokes, and I can only imagine it devastated him; he never told me about it. He tried to handle it himself, and that only put fuel on the fire. They came after him like a pack of wild dogs. Put his personal details online. Posted stolen therapy records. They went further every day. My son had a three-year-old daughter. They first claimed he molested her, then forged paperwork that purported to prove it. Pictures. They posted these—horrible videos of—” Rivard’s voice fails him, and for the first time, I feel sorry for him. I know this story. I’ve lived it.
He clears his throat. “The worst was, people believed it. There were websites formed around hounding him. Police investigated the claims of molestation. There was no truth to it, the case was dismissed, but that didn’t stop the crusade. There were avalanches of vile letters. Faxes. Phone calls. He couldn’t—he couldn’t get away from it. After a while, I suppose he didn’t even see the point of trying.” Rivard’s watery eyes suddenly shift to lock on mine. “You understand. I know you do, given what was done to you.”
I slowly nod. From the day that Melvin’s horror chamber was broken open, my kids and I have been targets. You never understand how vulnerable you are in this age of social media until something breaks against you, and then . . . then it’s too late. You can shut down Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; you can change your phone number and your e-mail. Move to new places. But for dedicated tormentors, that isn’t a barrier. It’s a challenge. They enjoy hitting. They don’t particularly care if the blows ever land, and it becomes a contest of who can post the most shocking, degrading material. The torrent comes from nowhere, and everywhere, and the hatred . . . it’s like poison, seeping from the screen into your brain.
It doesn’t take much of Absalom’s brand of abuse to erode your sense of balance, your confidence, your trust in those around you. When your enemies are faceless, they are everywhere. Paranoia becomes reality. At any given moment, even now, I can log on and find a firehose of hatred directed at me, and at my kids. I can watch it happen in real time. It’s a self-perpetuating engine of outrage.
So I can sympathize with the hopelessness Ballantine Rivard’s son felt. I had days where ending things felt like the only way out of the trap. I’d survived, just barely. He hadn’t. It isn’t fair, or right, but it’s dreadfully human, the way we tear each other apart.
“I’m sorry for what he went through,” I tell Rivard. I let a beat go by before I come back to the topic. “How did he kill himself?”
Rivard’s eyes go distant and blind. “He jumped from this tower. He had an apartment here. The glass was thick; he had to make a dedicated effort to break it. I believe he used a marble bust. Then he jumped. Twenty-eight stories.”
I give that a respectful moment of silence before I continue, “And, after he died . . . you hired this investigator to track down the people who went after him?”
“No. I hired Mr. Sauer to investigate who was driving him to the brink of madness well before that. But Mr. Sauer disappeared just prior to my son’s death.” His hands tap restlessly on the armrests of his chair. Grip them tightly, until I can almost hear his knuckles crack.